Many of you want to have a personal search engine for using only with a certain web site or to gather information about any other existing web site or Internet resource.

There are many tutorials that explain the mechanism of basic code construction for a search engine in various programming languages (client side or server side). In the same time, ready made solutions exist, but in this case, the search engines will offer various degrees of customization.

Sphider is a PHP application with a dual behavior, being a spider and a search engine at the same time. In other words, the spider can crawl any website, returning the results to a MySQL database and the search engine will display certain results from it, based on specific criteria given by queries performed with keywords or key expressions. You will only need to have a MySQL database and a server PHP enabled. The installation takes place almost instantly, by editing the database.php file from the "settings" directory, when you must provide the data necessary to establish the connection with MySQL database from PHP.

From the Sphider administration panel, you will be able to add the sites that must be indexed by the spider. There are also many indexing options available, such as indexing depth, URLs inclusion, file types and more. Every web site you choose to be indexed can be introduced in one of the categories that can be defined at any moment. If you do not have enough space on server, it is recommended to leave the indexing options to depth 0, because you will notice that as the depth level is increased, the file size (in the database) corresponding to a given web site will be larger.

The search settings allow you to modify results pagination, advanced search, relative weight of a word in title, domain name or meta keywords, suggestions and other useful customizations. You can change the look of the results display and the search page by modifying the files existing in templates directory. In the same way, the language can be adapted to suit your needs, by creating the appropriate translation in a language.php file.

In conclusion, Sphider search engine is a free lightweight indexing tool that is appropriate for using as a search facility for a single web site or as a link directory for one way links building. You can try also to study a certain web site behavior from the search engine optimization point of view.